


Zornmuseet

by wavewright62



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Dala Horses, Gen, Mora as the Centre of Culture, Pre-Canon, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 10:56:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14163321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wavewright62/pseuds/wavewright62
Summary: The legacy of Mora's native son, the painter Anders Zorn, lives on in the estate his family left to the nation of Sweden.  Just how did Mora of all places become Sweden's seat of culture?





	Zornmuseet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LooNEY_DAC](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LooNEY_DAC/gifts).



> This is my entry for the letter Z in the SSSS Alphabet Challenge.  
> LooNEY_DAC, I have finally finished your challenge! Thank you for setting me on this path.
> 
> Eleven-year-olds are eternal, bless their hearts.

\-----------

_Mora, 1906 pre-Rash reckoning_

“I almost don’t want to take sauna now.” The other women gasped in mock horror. “I pretended to take sauna all day, every day this week. The real one is much better, but I do not want to assume this position-“ her arm dipped gracefully over the water basin, “ever again.”

“You just _did,_ Hilda,” Anu laughed. “Would you prefer to be like me, standing on that cliff, staring out at sea? And just why am I naked?” The other women laughed.

“Maybe you are waiting for the sailors to come give you business,” Majken murmured with fake seductiveness, as Anu’s mouth dropped open. “Or, maybe you just lost the way to sauna.”

“Anu, you look like you’re thinking, ‘Can I see Estonia from here?’” They all laughed, including Anu.

The students continued teasing one another as they relaxed. These women had come from around Scandinavia and further afield to study with the master, the painter Anders Zorn, who allowed them the use of the lovely large sauna on the grounds of his estate. Some of them were dilettantes, some of them were reasonably respected as painters despite their gender, but they all took turns acting as models for one another as well as the master.

As the laughter died down, Magda spoke for the first time. “Do you know,” she said softly, “I had the strangest dream the other night. I dreamt I was in Mora, but there were huge fences everywhere, to keep the town safe. Everybody was wearing very strange clothing, and they all had on masks and gloves.”

“Nii, maybe there was an influenza?” one of the women suggested.

Magda shrugged. “Maybe, I don’t know, it was some kind of epidemic. There were millions of flies everywhere.” She rubbed at her legs with a washcloth. “Everybody was scared, it was pretty awful. I wanted to go to the studio and paint, but I wasn’t allowed in.”

Majken murmured, “Only you would try to paint in the middle of an epidemic, Magda.” She went on to relate a rather smutty dream she’d had, scandalising the other women.

Magda wrinkled her nose at Majken but did not reply. She decided not to share how real her dream had felt, even after she woke up. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the events in her dream had already happened.

\-----------

_Year 21_

The captain extended her long legs under the table and allowed herself to relax for a moment. It was rare to have such safety in summer any more, and she no longer entirely trusted it. She let her head fall backward, allowing her hat to fall off onto the floor below, and gazed idly at the colourful painting of a naked woman gazing out across the water. Long ago, in another lifetime, she had come through the Zornmuseet with her school group. The eleven-year-olds had tittered nervously over being in the presence of a picture of a naked woman. They didn’t appreciate the artistry, nor the history, it was just another school trip. The most memorable thing about it was the naked lady.

In the last twenty years they had seen many more naked people, in sickbeds, in hospices, dead on the roads and in their cars, fleeing from a disease that overwhelmed the world. The Rash had stripped their entire world naked, and left it festering. Then had come the black years of scavenger insects, gorging on the remains of the old world and everything left behind, dead… or not.

Saara had been orphaned when the Rash came to Sweden, somehow immune when her family and friends were not. At fourteen, she was put to work in the refugee camp, assigned to the insect control unit. Initially, much of this involved retrieving and burying the dead, until it became apparent that the areas where most of the bodies were, were also host to the violent undead. The Rash spread further into the countryside, adding animals both dead and undead into the mix. The school of thought that argued to let the insects do the clean-up for them as part of their natural process was yielded to, and the focus changed to keeping the insects off themselves and their scarce food.

Saara was reassigned to one of the scavenger groups organised to obtain any cloth or netting. While still dangerous, it was a much happier pursuit. She had fallen in love for the first time with one of her teammates, experiencing her first kiss when the team discovered a miraculously untouched sewing supplies shop. Saara had giddily draped a length of netting over her head like a bridal veil. Her teammate’s eyes widened, then they stepped over to Saara, solemnly lifted the veil and kissed her on the lips. She had been snuggling with that person the night their camp was overwhelmed by trolls; she still wore the scars from that attack on her body as well as her heart.

The remaining refugees arrived on the outskirts of Mora as winter closed in, and were allowed to stay. By that time Mora had heavily restricted access to its central core, had erected a fence around some of the surrounding residential areas. The new arrivals traded on their fighting experience and their hoard of materiel to secure a place in the community. Saara joined a group who occupied an abandoned house near the perimeter fence in Outer Mora.

She had a child with Ahmed, one of her housemates, but he joined the fledgling group of ‘cleansers,’ people who undertook the task of reclaiming an area by burning it to the ground. Flies couldn’t feed on ash, after all. Only her baby daughter Pippi kept her going when Ahmed was lost in an explosion that went wrong. Saara joined the security forces charged with maintaining Mora’s safety, and over the years had risen to captaincy status. The headquarters of the town’s security currently occupied the large house of the Zorngården, on Mora’s perimeter.

She closed her eyes, blocking out the wistful painting, and let the weariness flow through her limbs. How many lifetimes had she lived in these last twenty years? The town was reasonably stable, thanks in no small part to the efforts of her unit. She was privy to the huge contrast between life inside and outside Mora’s fence, but no longer resented the attitudes of the those who had never been outside. Her own daughter rolled her eyes when Saara admonished her for going out without mask and gloves. She’d even once seen a school group come through the museum building, restored from its use as a hospital ward; eleven-year-olds who’d grown up inside Mora’s safe zone, giggling at the naked lady in the picture. Who was normal, Saara wondered, these children, or herself?

Perhaps it was time to reconsider the offer she’d been made, to head up a unit to clear the train tracks to Björköfärden. Pippi had advised her to take up the offer ‘before you’re too old,’ the impertinent girl. But it was true, at thirteen the girl had a job of her own, driving a horse-drawn cart around town. Children went to work early in this new world.

Saara broke out of her reverie with a shudder, as she felt eyes watching her. The current director of the Zornmuseet, Petrus Bergström, was leaning in the doorway. As she acknowledged him, he slid his sketch pad under his arm before walking in. After exchanging pleasantries, he asked Saara, “are you set for your headquarters moving to new premises this winter?”

She nodded, but threw a glance to the piles of paperwork obviously still strewn around the office. All attempts to set up a computer network inside the building had failed due to the antiquated pre-Rash equipment, forcing them to refurbish antique typewriters to make paper records. They were finishing building a new office as part of the railway station upgrade, which was also meant to include a visitor processing centre. She grimaced, “A waste of resources, if you ask me. We need to feed our people more than we need tourists. I would have preferred more greenhouses or something.” Petrus didn’t respond, so she cocked her head to one side and asked, “so what’s going in here when we leave?”

“Oh, it will return to gallery space again.”

“The whole building?”

“Nii,” He smiled tightly, “as it should be. That is what the trust set it up for, so many years ago, as a gift from the artist’s family to the people of Sweden.” Ignoring Saara’s glare, Petrus put his hand in his pocket and drew out a small figure, which he solidly placed facing Saara. “Go on, tell me what this is.”

Anyone could see what it was; it was a dala horse, a carved wooden horse with bright kurvits designs painted onto it. She decided to humour him. “Why, I do believe it’s a Dala horse.”

“Correct. A completely normal Dala horse.”

“Normal. What’s ‘normal’ anymore?”

“We are,” he crossed his arms over his chest and smiled. “Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö, Linköping, Uppsala…what do we have in Mora that they don’t have?”

“Living people,” Saara snorted mirthlessly.

“Blunt,” he shrugged, “but _correct.”_ Saara frowned at him. “We know there are pockets of survivors left in Scandinavia, and Finland, and there are rumours that there are survivors in Russia, too. We don’t know, we may establish communications with other pockets of survivors around the globe. But for now, Mora seems to be the biggest town left in all of Sweden. It’s up to _us_ to carry on Swedish culture.” He hefted the horse again.

“You’re kidding me,” Saara stood and leaned on the desk. “You talk about Swedish _culture_ like we’re all still sitting on our Ikea chairs cheering on the Eurovision finalists. We’re just as likely as anybody else to kill one another over a box of stale 20-year-old crispbread.” _Or worse,_ she thought, pushing back gruesome memories.

Petrus regarded her coolly. “I should point out that _you_ have been sitting on an Ikea chair.” He peered into the horse’s eyeless face. “I go into people’s houses, and with what little they have, they try to make it homey. I’ve seen one of these in almost every house. I’m willing to bet that you have one at your house, too.”

She did. It was Pippi’s favourite treasure. Ahmed had given it to Saara before he joined the cleansers. “Nii,” she acknowledged and sat down again. “Looking back isn’t going to help us, though.”

“If you believe the Norwegians, looking back is the only way to go. They’re all over there setting up Viking jarl halls and worshipping the old Norse gods again! It’s madness.” He shook his head.

“You mean, like Thor and Loki and-and…?,” she struggled to remember the names. She had a vague memory of a movie she’d seen as a child before the Rash; it had been in English. It had been pretty exciting, but, “they think that stuff is real? Seriously?”

Petrus shrugged. “Anyway, we have _this.”_ He gestured with the horse to the artworks on the walls. “This is ours. Zorn, kurvits, Dala horses, the whole thing. Maybe someday we’ll go back to the big cities and see what we can find there, but right now, _we_ are Sweden.”

Saara stared at Petrus, letting the import of his words sink in. After a moment, he excused himself. Saara retrieved her hat from behind the chair before leaving the office herself. _We are Sweden,_ his words echoed in her head.

Petrus turned the lights on in his studio, smiling at the electric light bulb burning brightly. After over 20 years of darkness in the long Swedish winters, he would never again fail to appreciate the return of reasonably dependable electricity, and liked to work under bright lights even in the summer. He uncovered his painting and sat down to work, opening the sketch pad to the quick pose studies he’d made of Saara deep in thought at her desk. Humming softly, he mixed his colours on the palette.

\-----------

_Year 74_

The eleven-year-olds shuffled into the room slowly. They’d already been shown through the working farm and greenhouses on the grounds of the Zorn estate, had had the tour of Anders Zorn’s home, and were now coming to the end of the standard tour in the Zornmuseet itself.

Some of them began to nudge one another and snigger, pointing up at the colourful picture of the naked lady without being seen to point. Their teacher, long since accustomed to the antics of eleven-year-olds, did not allow a reaction to show on his face. The docent was telling them about Anders Zorn and his students as she pointed out the works on the walls. The teacher drifted nonchalantly until he came to stand right behind the most troublesome of this year’s group, forcing them to keep their tittering down.

The docent asked the group if they had any questions, not expecting any answer, and took a breath to begin the next segment. A small hand shot up. Docent and teacher both stared at the girl, but the docent closed her mouth and gestured to her to ask the question.

“That’s my grandmother,” she stated matter-of-factly. The tittering rose in volume considerably, prompting the teacher to clear his throat loudly.

The confused docent immediately looked up at the picture that made the children titter every year, knowing that it was painted too long ago to be of the girl’s grandmother, but the girl pointed at another painting on the opposite wall. It was a study of a uniformed woman slumped in her chair behind a desk, head thrown back, blonde hair streaming down the back of the chair. The colours were sombre, except for the shaft of light dramatically illuminating the woman’s jaw, throat, and shoulder. “That one right there. That’s my grandmother.”

The docent opened her mouth and closed it again, but then recovered herself sufficiently to say, “Ah, yes, that one is much more recent.” She straightened her spine and regarded the painting. “It is by Petrus Bergström, the first director of the museum in modern times.” She looked around at the class with genuine interest for the first time, and the students in turn were staring either at the painting or at their resolute classmate. “We know this was painted around Year 21, around the time the Mora security forces were garrisoned in this building, but you say the woman is your grandmother?”

The girl nodded, setting her long blonde plait bobbing. “Yes, ma’am. We have a picture like that at my house.” Petrus had gifted one of the studies for the painting to Saara. She’d found a frame for it and it hung in her house in Mora, and then the one occupied by Saara’s daughter Pippi and her family, including her eleven-year-old daughter Agneta.

Docent and teacher exchanged a look, and the docent smiled genuinely as she turned back to Agneta. As far as the docent knew, no one had ever identified the nameless woman in the painting. “She was a railroad lady,” Agneta stated proudly, “like I’m going to be.”

**Author's Note:**

> It's just too fortuitous that this fabulous real-life amenity just happens to be within the confines of safe Mora in canon! Alas, two regions also included in the real Zorn estate are not within the cleansed zones, one being the farm retreat. The other is a cluster of historical buildings that would lie within the cleansed area further around the lake, but in an area that would have required those buildings to be razed by cleansers. I was going to include that razing within the scope of this fic but it didn't make the cut.
> 
> I have mentioned the facilities of the Zorn estate several times in my previous fics. In particular, I mention a sauna on the grounds, which shows up as a passing mention in 'The Heat of the Moment,' and is the unnamed public sauna Tuuri visits in the AU 'Stranded.' The estate as a whole is the setting of 'Yom Kippur.'
> 
> The painting of the naked lady mentioned in this fic is Anders Zorn's painting [In the Skerries](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Nude_paintings_by_Anders_Zorn#/media/File:Anders_Zorn_-_In_the_Skerries_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg) from 1894.  
> Hilda mentions posing for another painting, which is [Girls from Dalarna in the Sauna](https://www.anderszorn.org/Girls-From-Dalarna-In-The-Sauna.html) from 1906.
> 
> The author's own grandmother studied painting under Anders Zorn in the early 1900s and happened to be named Hilda, but I don't _think_ that's her in the sauna painting. *squints* *shrugs* It is her recollection of the students using one another as models that is referenced here, but is not a specific anecdote.


End file.
